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June 30, 2010

I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose
and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

That's why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion,
though it's an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.
It's hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from,
when so often they're put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty.

What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons,
who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues,
and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand,
work at changing his destiny for their convenience?

It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today,
and so you may think that I am only joking
or that I've devised just one more means
of praising Art with the help of irony.

There was a time when only wise books were read,
helping us to bear our pain and misery.
This, after all, is not quite the same
as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics.

And yet the world is different from what it seems to be
and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.
People therefore preserve silent integrity,
thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry,
as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
under unbearable duress and only with the hope
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.

It is this fine film on the swirls of the cloudy wine of the sea
It is this great rearing of the horses of the earth
halted at the last moment on a gasp of the chasm
it is this black sand which roughs itself up on the hiccup of the abyss
it is this stubborn serpent's crawling out the shipwreck
this mouthful of stars revomited into a cake of fireflies
this stone on the ocean tugging with its drool
at a trembling hand for passing birds
here Sun and Moon
form the two cleverly engaged toothed wheels
of a Time ferocious in grinding us
it is this wretchedness
these droppings
this sob of coral reefs
it is alighting from the memorable sky
down onto the lure of our hearts red at dawn
this beak of prey breaking the unwelcoming chest
cage
and
quagmire
It is this kestrel which hovering blazons the noon sky of our black hearts
this abducting
this sacking
this dumping

I, Bertolt Brecht, came out of the black forests.
My mother moved me into the cities as I lay
Inside her body. And the coldness of the forests
Will be inside me till my dying day.

2

In the asphalt city I'm at home. From the very start
Provided with every last sacrament:
With newspapers. And tobacco. And brandy.
To the end mistrustful, lazy, and content.

3

I'm polite and friendly to people. I put on
A hard hat because that's what they do.
I say: they are animals with quite a peculiar smell
And I say: does it matter? I am too.

4

Before noon on my empty rocking chairs
I'll sit a woman or two, and with an untroubled eye
Look at them steadily and say to them:
Here you have someone on whom you can't rely.

5

Towards evening it's men that I gather round me
And then we address one another as "gentlemen".
They're resting their feet on table tops
And say: things will get better for us. And I don't ask when.

6

In the grey light before morning the pine trees piss
And the vermin, the birds, raise their twitter and cheep.
At that hour in the city I drain my glass, then throw
The cigar butt away and worriedly go to sleep.

7

We have sat, an easy generation
In houses held to be indestructible
(Thus we built those tall boxes on the island of Manhattan
And those thin aerials that amuse the Atlantic swell).

8

Of those cities will remain what passed through them, the wind!
The house makes glad the eater: he clears it out.
We know that we're only tenants, provisional ones
And after us there will come: nothing worth talking about.

9

In the earthquakes to come, I very much hope
I shall keep my cigar alight, embittered or no
I, Bertolt Brecht, carried off to the asphalt cities
From the black forests inside my mother long ago.

THE MESSAGE IN THE BOTTLE
(The Poet Is Asked Why He No Longer Writes Poems)

(A few illegible lines, then:)
"... my fingers
are frozen. This bottle's in my left hand. The right
holds the joystick. It has grown very stiff.
There's thick ice on the wings. I don't
know whether the engine can take it. It makes Queer
snoring noises in here. It's terribly cold.
I don't know how high up I am
(or how deep? or how far?)
Nearness and distance--all empty. And all
my instruments are frozen: the scales
of Lessing and the compressometer of the Academy;
the Martinetti altimeter, too. I think
I must be high enough because the penguins
no longer lift their heads as my propeller
drones above them, cutting across
the Northern Lights. They no longer hear me. Here are
no signs to see. Down there's some rocky land. New land?
Unknown? Ever explored before? By whom? Perhaps
by Scott? Strindberg? Byron? Leopardi?
I don't know. And I confess
I don't care. I'm cold, the taste
of this thin air is bitter, horribly bitter...
It could be that my nose has started to bleed.
I'm hungry... I've eaten all my biscuits.
Some unknown star keeps blinking
at the point I gaze at. The pemmican
has gone maggoty... What star can that be?
Perhaps already... from the beyond...? And what's the date?
Wednesday? Thursday? Or New Year's Eve? Who could be
sitting around the homely hearth? Little brothers,
singing birds,
beside the anxiously guarded hearth
of petty feelings; bird brothers in the depths
of the human heart's jungle... Hallo! Hallo!
Is there no one to hear this exiled fellow-crow, myself?

A little while ago

something crackled through the rusty antenna of my radio...
I hear that Mr. D. has found a fine adjective
in Banality Harbour
while C. has discovered a new metaphor
between two rhymes in Love Canal.
The Society reporting it. Congratulations!
I'll ... tell you all ... that I ...
when I get home... and... land...
all that I ...felt up here... only when
he escapes... can... the traveler... relate it....
But does he ever escape to return?
Now I put these few confused lines
into the empty wine bottle
and drop it through the hatch. Like rolling dice!
If an uncouth pearl-diver finds it, let him
throw it away, a broken oyster,
but should a literate sailor find it,
I send this message through him:
"Here I am, at the Thirteenth Latitude of Desolation,
the Hundredth Longitude of Shame,
the utmost Altitude of teeth-gnashing Defiance,
somewhere far out, at the point of the Ultimate,
and still I wonder whether it is possible
to go any farther..."

No foreign sky protected me,
no stranger's wing shielded my face.
I stand as witness to the common lot,
survivor of that time, that place.

–"Requiem"

Amedeo Modigliani. Anna Akhmatova. c. 1911.

Pencil on paper.

The Muse

All that I am hangs by a thread tonight
as I wait for her whom no one can command.
Whatever I cherish most – youth, freedom, glory –
fades before her who bears the flute in her hand.

And look! she comes...she tosses back her veil,
staring me down, serene and pitiless.
"Are you the one," I ask, "whom Dante heard dictate
the lines of his Inferno?" She answers: "Yes." –1924

–Translated from the Russian by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward

Anna Akhmatova (1924)

'On the Centenary of Anna Akhmatova'
by Joseph Brodsky

A page and fire, grain and millstones,
the cutting edge of a poleaxe and a cut-off hair –
God preserves everything; especially words
of forgiveness and love,
as his own voice.

In them (the words) there beats a lacerated pulse, in them can be heard a crunch of bones,
and a [gravedigger's] spade in them pounds; flat and somewhat muffled,
since one has only one life, from mortal lips they
sound more clearly than from the cotton wool above this world.

Great soul, greetins [literally: a bow] from across the seas
for finding them, – to you and to the decayable part of you
which sleeps in [its] native land, [that] thanks to you
acquired the gift of speech amidst a deaf-mute universe.

June 21, 2010

The city is quiet at dusk,
when pale stars waken from their swoon,
and resounds at noon with the voices
of ambitious philosophers and merchants
bearing velvet from the East.
The flames of conversation burn there,
but not pyres.
Old churches, the mossy stones
of ancient prayer, are both its ballast
and its rocket ship.
It is a just city
where foreigners aren’t punished,
a city quick to remember
and slow to forget,
tolerating poets, forgiving prophets
for their hopeless lack of humor.
The city was based
on Chopin’s preludes,
taking from them only joy and sorrow.
Small hills circle it
in a wide collar; ash trees
grow there, and the slim poplar,
chief justice in the state of trees.
The swift river flowing through the city’s heart
murmurs cryptic gretings
day and night
from the springs, the mountains, and the sky.

June 18, 2010

.
"Why did we become blind, I don't know, perhaps one day we'll find out, Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see."
—José Saramago, Blindness

June 15, 2010

My gaze is clear like a sunflower.
It is my custom to walk the roads
Looking right and left
And sometimes looking behind me,
And what I see at each moment
Is what I never saw before,
And I’m very good at noticing things.
I’m capable of feeling the same wonder
A newborn child would feel
If he noticed that he’d really and truly been born.
I feel at each moment that I’ve just been born
Into a completely new world…

I believe in the world as in a daisy,
Because I see it. But I don’t think about it,
Because to think is to not understand.
The world wasn’t made for us to think about it
(To think is to have eyes that aren’t well)
But to look at it and to be in agreement.

I have no philosophy, I have senses…
If I speak of Nature it’s not because I know what it is
But because I love it, and for that very reason,
Because those who love never know what they love
Or why they love, or what love is.

How many masks wear we, and undermasks,
Upon our countenance of soul, and when,
If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks,
Knows it the last mask off and the face plain?
The true mask feels no inside to the mask
But looks out of the mask by co-masked eyes.
Whatever consciousness begins the task
The task's accepted use to sleepness ties.
Like a child frighted by its mirrored faces,
Our souls, that children are, being thought-losing,
Foist otherness upon their seen grimaces
And get a whole world on their forgot causing;
And, when a thought would unmask our soul's masking,
Itself goes not unmasked to the unmasking.

O HEART, be at peace, because
Nor knave nor dolt can break
What's not for their applause,
Being for a woman's sake.
Enough if the work has seemed,
So did she your strength renew,
A dream that a lion had dreamed
Till the wilderness cried aloud,
A secret between you two,
Between the proud and the proud.

What, still you would have their praise!
But here's a haughtier text,
The labyrinth of her days
That her own strangeness perplexed;
And how what her dreaming gave
Earned slander, ingratitude,
From self-same dolt and knave;
Aye, and worse wrong than these.
Yet she, singing upon her road,
Half lion, half child, is at peace.

June 5, 2010

The weeping of the guitar
begins.
The goblets of dawn
are smashed.
The weeping of the guitar
begins.
Useless
to silence it.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps monotonously
as water weeps
as the wind weeps
over snowfields.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps for distant
things.
Hot southern sands
yearning for white camellias.
Weeps arrow without target
evening without morning
and the first dead bird
on the branch.
Oh, guitar!
Heart mortally wounded
by five swords.